STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Not all Internet search engines yield the same results for the same query, but that may have as much to do with how Web sites are managed as how search engines work.

Web site administrators increasingly are barring some search engines from all or part of their sites, while granting others more access, according to a recent study by Penn State University researchers.

C. Lee Giles, an information sciences and technology professor and the lead author of the study, said site administrators may allow crawlers from Google Inc. the most access among search engines because they know Google produces a lot of traffic.

"When they first grew, did administrators say, 'Hmmm, this is really good, let's give them better access?' " he said. "And as a consequence, they're getting even (more)."

Search engines comb the Internet using programs known as "robots," "spiders," "crawlers" or "bots." A programmer can use a "robots.txt" file to police the crawlers trying to access a site.

"It's not that the search engines are better, but it's the people out there making policy and making decisions on what to crawl to," Giles said.

Google Inc. spokeswoman Jessica Powell said the company has "worked with many Web publishers (and) done a lot of outreach to make their content discoverable," but sites are ultimately the ones to decide which search engines to let in.

Representatives of Yahoo Inc. did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Microsoft representative said the company will "share data on more than 7 million unique robots.txt files collected from the Internet" to aid future research.

Sony plans studio in India to develop online games

The Associated Press

MUMBAI, India - Seeing a huge potential market in young people in India, Sony Online Entertainment LLC plans to develop online games here with local content and a local partner.

The company is talking to developers and aims to set up the studio early next year, likely in the city of Bangalore, David Christensen, the company's business development and international operations vice president, said Wednesday.

"We need to have Indian content for our games and we are looking for local partners," Christensen said on the sidelines of a gaming conference in Mumbai, India's finance and entertainment hub.

"We will contribute our technology to the joint venture," he said. The local partner would be expected to provide the creative talent for the games and chip in toward setting up the studio.

Sony recently tied up with Virgin Comics, a Bangalore-based collaboration comprised of self-help guru Deepak Chopra, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and Virgin Group's Sir Richard Branson. With Sony, Virgin is developing a multiplayer online game based on "Ramayan 3329," a comic book written by Chopra and Kapur and inspired by a famous Indian epic about a battle against demons.

Online gaming is just catching on in India with about 2.8 million devotees. Developers expect the market to explode as broadband penetration grows during the next few years.

With more than 50 percent of India's population under the age of 25, analyst firm Pearl Research expects the country's online games market to reach $200 million by 2010, up from $4 million now.

The Ramayan comic was released in the United States last year, and Bangalore-based Virgin is currently in talks on a movie version.

BEIJING - If U.S. Internet companies are maturing, China's are still reveling in the kind of party atmosphere their U.S. rivals enjoyed during the late 1990s, with copious capital and enough engineering talent to keep growing for a while.

Executives, including Kai-Fu Lee, vice president of Google Inc. and president of Google Greater China, warned participants in an industry conference in Beijing this week against a get-rich-quick mentality.

But they said that between strong investor interest and an education system churning out information technology graduates by the thousand, the groundwork is solid for years of continued steady growth in China.

"For many Chinese young people and young students, they have a very strong desire for innovation, for being successful, for starting their own businesses," Kai-Fu Lee, vice president of Google Inc. and president of Google Greater China, told participants in an industry conference in Beijing this week.

About 300,000 students receive high-tech degrees in China annually, said Zhang Ya-Qin, chief executive of Microsoft in China and its research development group. But he said Chinese graduates need more curiosity and more ideas.

Pony Ma, whose QQ system dominates the Chinese market for instant messaging, said China's Internet and mobile information industries are just getting off the ground, leaving plenty of room for growth in the more traditional Web fields.

"Generally speaking, it has been developing in a very healthy way. In the past one or two years, it was sort of crazy ... but now it has become much better," Ma said.

Most of the Internet businesses developing in China are likely to cater to local interests and local online needs, which remain largely unmet, the executives said.

Software helps Web users detect interference

The Associated Press

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Increasingly worried over Internet providers' behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering.

The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover "data discrimination" - efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services - in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources.

"People have all sorts of problems, and they don't know whether to attribute that to some sort of misconfiguration, or deliberate behavior by the ISP," said Seth Schoen, a staff technologist with EFF.

The new software compares lists of data packets sent and received by two different computers and looks for discrepancies between what one sent and the other actually received. Previously, the process had to be done manually.

Schoen compared the software to a spelling checker.

"If you really had no idea what you were looking for, this could save dozens of hours," he said.

Increasingly, people are contacting the EFF worried that their online activity has been disrupted by their Internet service provider, he said. The goal of the EFF's program is to "help consumers get more clarity about what the ISPs are doing."

An Associated Press investigation, published last month, confirmed in nationwide tests that Comcast Corp., the No. 2 U.S. Internet provider, interfered with attempts by some subscribers to its high-speed service to share files online. EFF, which had been running its own tests, later said its findings were consistent with the AP's results.

The tests revealed that a PC would see messages from Comcast that were invisible to the user that told it to stop communicating, which would lead it to cancel a download or upload.

Now comes a scheme some researchers say amounts to extortion: One site's threat to disable visitors' computers with relentless pop-up ads if they don't pay for a subscription they were automatically signed up for after a free trial.

The threats, reported this week by researchers at security vendor McAfee Inc.'s Avert Labs, affect people who visit the Web site and download software to access a free three-day trial membership.

Visitors do get free access for three days, but the download includes code that then generates a stream of pop-up windows, when the user is online and offline, demanding payment of roughly $80 for 90 days' worth of additional access.

The windows stay open up to 10 minutes and appear once a day. They appear on top of any open windows and restore to their original size if shrunk or moved, making them impossible to ignore. They also reappear if the computer is rebooted.

The site actually warns visitors they will be billed as full members - and lose full use of their computers if they don't pay - unless they cancel the subscription within the trial period. But the warning appears in the full terms and conditions statement, which downloaders aren't required to read.

Once the fees are paid, the software can be removed with a special file.

"What it appears they are doing is, in my humble opinion, a form of extortion based on the (usually correct) assumption that a person's computer will be key to many other activities in their daily life," McAfee researcher Seth Purdy wrote on the Avert Labs blog.